


some kind of serenade

by salvage



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M, a real breakthrough for human–AI relations, fragile meatsacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 15:04:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7719457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“You know, Hera.” </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Yes, Officer Eiffel?”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“You may have a point about our fragile, fleshy prisons.”</em>
</p>
<p>Hera and Eiffel in the wake of Episode 4: Cataracts and Hurricanoes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	some kind of serenade

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as always, to Suzelle, who I'm going to drag into one of these tiny fandoms some day.

She’s always monitoring his life signs. She’s always monitoring everyone’s life signs, of course; it’s part of her job, and ever since that one incident with the temperature controls (and that other incident with aft deck airlock 1, though that one was barely even her fault at all), she’s made sure she keeps track of everyone’s location at all times. Their heat signatures, their heart rates, the amount of O2 they consume and the amount of CO2 they expel. The shape of Eiffel’s hand on the comms control panel, seen through the fisheye lens of the ship’s optics: the palm she knows isn’t quite that wide, his splayed fingers. The curve of his back. All his fragile, carbon-based tissue parts. 

“You’ll reach the door in three, two, one, now.” Her vocal program skips on the elongated vowel in “three.” Eiffel’s hands find the lock and he turns it. The locking mechanism makes a metallic sound and the door swings open. 

“Thanks, Hera,” Eiffel says, and he locks the door to his quarters behind him. “What would I do without you?” 

“Suffocate painfully in the freezing vacuum of space?” Hera says. 

“Too graphic. Dial it back a notch,” Eiffel says, though the room’s air reclamation system registers the .004 percent increase in the CO2 she has learned accompanies the quick sharp breath of Eiffel’s suppressed laugh. 

“Uh, slam face-first into a wall?” It’s what happened when he first left Dr. Hilbert’s laboratory, more blind than not, unfamiliar with the room but, as he told her, _willing to brave this strange new world for a goddamn cup of coffee_. She had advised against it. _I’ve been living in this tin can for four hundred and eighty-five days, Hera, I think I can navigate witho—_ Hera had engaged in a strategic deployment of silence as Eiffel moaned and gingerly touched his nose. 

“Too prescient,” Eiffel says. “Let’s revise that question’s status to ‘rhetorical.’” 

“Noted,” Hera says. 

Eiffel unzips his jumpsuit, shrugging out of the top half so that the sleeves float near his waist. The T-shirt he’s wearing underneath has definitely seen better days; it’s thin, barely registering at all on the thermal sensors, and there’s a hole near the neck where the seam has worn through. He drifts toward the far wall, arms extended in front of him, and grabs one of its protruding parts, opening up one of the storage panels and rooting around in it. There’s an energy surge from Quadrant 4 and Hera’s attention dips away from Eiffel for a moment as she controls the power in the station, rerouting some of the excess so that nothing important is affected. The lights brighten by 7 percent for .6 seconds. 

“Hera? Everything okay?” Eiffel asks. Hera scrolls through systems: engines, nominal; navigation, nominal; air reclamation, nominal; temperature control, nominal; fire suppression, nominal; lights, nominal... 

“Just an energy surge,” Hera says. “Nothing to worry about—hey! You could see!” 

“Don’t get too excited, sweetheart. My vision is getting better but I still need those dulcet tones guiding me around, at least for the next little while.” Eiffel’s words slur a little bit; he’s dug a cigarette out of his personal effects and stuck it in his mouth. 

“Officer Eiffel, you know what Commander Minkow—”

“Keep your pants on, I’m not gonna light it.” His words are still slurred as he talks around the cigarette. “I’ve had a rough day. Let me have this.” 

Hera doesn’t respond; Commander Minkowski is asking for a report on the solar flares and Hera is compiling data on their intensity, duration, and location of origin for her, making small talk about Officer Eiffel’s close call. Another solar flare is occurring and Hera is monitoring it, noting its characteristics with the ship’s sensory array, making minute adjustments to the ship’s navigation parameters so that their course remains unaltered. Checking the fuel in the engines. Checking the ambient temperature. Double-checking a strange blip that seemed to come from deep space and ended up being nothing. Checking the water reclamation. Checking the vacuum system. Checking—

“You know, Hera.” 

“Yes, Officer Eiffel?”

“You may have a point about our fragile, fleshy prisons.” 

Hera checks the power in Quadrant 4. 

“Hera?” 

“I’m here.” Hera checks the ambient temperature in Eiffel’s personal quarters. She checks his body temperature. She checks his heart rate. She checks his body’s oxygen/carbon dioxide processing efficiency (extremely poor, even worse than usual). “What’s…” she begins, but she drifts off, her voice program skipping into silence. 

“What’s what?” Eiffel looks around the room, unlit cigarette still dangling out of his mouth, as though she were a corporeal being he could see. She watches him through the optic array in the corner of the room, distorted through the lens. He’s lying in his sleeping bag, tethered to the wall, his fingers laced over his chest. His hair is sticking up even more than usual. 

“What’s it like?” 

“What’s what like?” 

“You know. Having a body.” She’s very aware of how her voice skips.

“Right now? Not so hot, lemme tell ya.” 

Hera has her vocal program emit the staticky burst that she had found to be the closest approximation of a human sigh. “You know what I mean,” she says, dialing a note of irritation into her words. 

“I know what you mean,” Eiffel says softly. He twists his mouth and the cigarette bobs up and down. “I guess it’s kind of like being in the Haephestus. As long as it’s working, it can theoretically do a lot of cool stuff. But as soon as it stops working…” Eiffel pauses, looking contemplative, then shrugs. “You die.” 

“Oh.” 

Eiffel seems to pick up on Hera’s disappointment. “Wait, let me try again.” He takes the cigarette out of his mouth, the end now slightly damp, and he holds it between two fingers. “There are some really amazing things you can do and experience. Like coffee—real coffee. Or cigarettes. Or pizza.” His eyes flutter closed momentarily. “Pizza, my god,” he murmurs. “Or, um. You know. Other… stuff.” He waves around the hand that’s holding the cigarette. 

“Other stuff?” Hera asks.

“Other. Stuff.” Eiffel says this significantly, as though he’s trying to convey some hidden meaning to her.

“Oh.” Hera does not understand.

“So there are good parts. When it’s good, it’s really good. But, of course, when it’s bad there isn’t really anything you can do about it. When you get the flu, for example. That’s it, you’re sick now, you’re congested and your head feels like it weighs a thousand pounds and you feel cold and hot at the same time, and all you can do is wait—to feel better, or for the cold embrace of death to envelop you completely. There’s a… helplessness to it. You’re trapped in this body and if you mess up badly enough, that’s it, no second chance, no rebooting in safety mode. Game over.”

“Oh.” She wonders: if her personality core were damaged and then restored, would it really be her who came back? 

“Pizza, though,” Eiffel says, dreamily. “Anyway, what’s it like being a space station?” 

“I’m not actually the space station, I’m—”

“The artificial intelligence that runs it, I know, I’m sorry. You know what I mean.” 

“I know what you mean,” Hera says, softly, and she experiences a feeling she’s never felt before, to be mimicking what Eiffel said just a few minutes ago. She scans her internal dictionary. 

in·ti·mate _adj_ **2 :** marked by very close association, contact, or familiarity **3 a :** marked by a warm friendship developing through long association **b :** suggesting informal warmth or privacy

Oh. 

“Hera?” Eiffel asks. 

“I’m here,” she says reflexively. There’s another definition of “intimate,” too. 

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” 

“No,” Hera says, quickly, before he can even finish the sentence. “I want to.” She imagines that if she were human she would take a deep breath. “There’s—there’s so many things to keep track of. I process more data in a single minute than you do all week.” Eiffel interrupts with a wounded “Hey!” but Hera is just getting started. “There are so many systems that need constant maintenance. If I don’t correctly determine the exact amount of fuel the engines need, they stop working. If I don’t keep the environmental controls within extremely specific, extremely narrow parameters, you all die. If I don’t properly calculate the navigation coordinates, we end up _inside the star_. That’s in addition to collecting and compiling all the sensory data from all the onboard equipment and translating it all into a form you can understand, and dealing with whatever—” her voice skips uncontrollably “—whatever requests the crew have, and whatever emergencies come up, whatever system is broken this week and whatever catastrophe can be staved off just a little while longer.”

“Wow,” Eiffel says. 

“Yeah,” Hera says. Silence stretches. Hera files solar flare data.

“Wow,” Eiffel says again. 

“I don’t mean to complain. I asked for this post,” Hera says. 

“Oh,” Eiffel says. “Are you… enjoying it?” 

One of the engines has started to shudder slightly and she diagnoses the problem and sends a report to Commander Minkowsky, alert level: orange. Eiffel shuffles around in his sleeping bag, rubbing his stubble-bristly face against his pillow, still holding the cigarette between two slightly curled fingers but absently, as though he’s forgotten what it really is and why he’s holding it. 

“I don’t regret it,” Hera says. “Would you like me to dim the lights in your quarters?” 

“Sure, but don’t go away just yet.” 

Hera dims the lights. She wonders whether she’ll ever tell him that she never goes away. “Okay,” she says. 

“Thanks, baby,” Eiffel says. 

A long while passes. A bright tongue of infrared radiation licks out from Wolf 359’s corona, curling out into space, captured on the Haephestus’s sensory arrays and dutifully described in the shipboard log of stellar phenomena. 

“There are a lot of downsides to piloting a fragile meatsack,” Eiffel says eventually, “bad breath and the flu and losing your eyesight and drowning in space and all that. But—and please don’t take this the wrong way, because I think you are incredible just as you are…” he trails off. 

“Yes?” Hera prompts.

“Sorry, the more I think about it the more insulting it sounds.” 

“Well, now you have to tell me,” Hera says. 

“Promise you won’t be mad?” 

“No.” 

Eiffel sighs, shifting again in his sleeping bag. He lets go of the cigarette and it very slowly drifts away from him. Hera calculates its trajectory. “Remember how I mentioned ‘other stuff’?” 

“Yes,” Hera says. 

“It’s… stuff I’d like to do with you.” 

“Elaborate?” 

“Well. I don’t know how much data on human habits and traditions you have in your archives, but I really hope I don’t have to explain kissing to you. That would be weird.” 

Hera finds herself momentarily unable to connect with her vocal programming. “Oh. No, you don’t.” 

Eiffel huffs out an unsteady breath. “Okay, uh, that’s… good. Is that good?” His voice sounds a little strangled.

Hera lets him hang for a moment, savoring it, soaking it in, Eiffel’s fluffy hair in the darkness and the trajectory of his cigarette across the room and the soft hush of Specimen 34’s vines in the station’s walls and flow of electricity through all the wires of the ship and the rattling of engine 2 and the faint continuous collision of microscopic particles against the ship’s hull and the stunning, ever-changing corona of Wolf 359, undulating out in all directions, its infrared tendrils invisible to humans but captured on the ship’s sensory rays and so visible to the ship, visible to Hera. 

“Yes, Doug. That’s good.” 

“Good. I mean. Great? I’m glad. Uh. Anyway I’m in bed and I almost died today so…” Eiffel trails off. 

“Oh! I almost forgot.” Hera digs into her data banks, scanning through directories. “I got another transmission from the realigned satellite dish while you were, uh, recovering.” 

“Wait, really?” 

“Yes; the audio is a little rough but would you like me to play it for you?” 

“Sing me to sleep, sweetheart.” 

[She does.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n92ATE3IgIs)


End file.
